Article

  • Cartography

    I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted, impoverished—especially in snow, which returns it to black and white. And sometimes I look and see nothing— but the elementary smoke rising from a human village, overpopulated, and yet undermade. A woman from there is walking along the side of the road to the…

  • The Blowjob Whale

    We thought we were onto something new. We loved doing it in the out-of-doors, thought ourselves pioneers: the first to sneak off into the darkness, unzip the fly, to feel a breeze on the back of our necks, to open our mouths, our hearts, his heart. We were partial to certain places: the park, the…

  • [hodos]

    Greek. 1. A traveled way; a road. 2. A traveler’s way; journey. The idea of a woman as a road has a certain appeal: I think of setting off along myself, boots sucking softly at the mud. The Greeks imagined the uterus hiking up and down. The booted empty uterus, sniffing for blood. And the…

  • Coming of Age in Book Country

    I knew I was back in New York when I saw children walking to school with books open in their hands. I’d lived away for fifteen years. Now down the streets of Brooklyn they drifted, novels spread wide between their palms, the actual world comprising a mere running margin of asphalt and high-heeled shoes and…

  • The romantic getaway

    We live alone together except for five cats, yet sometimes the only way to be truly alone is to run away together. Away from the computer, e-mail, Facebook, the cell phone, the land line, meetings, the endless list of things to be done— that no matter how many I cross off, keeps growing so that…

  • Hour of the Changes

    A wild early April strangeness, crazier than any autumn evening, mild air full of flooding wind, motions of storming branches, a queer, creaky, crying sound way off, as the rain advances— What’s that?—thud of thunder? a big tree going down? the sound of the untime after? No, only the hour of the changes, swift, oceanic,…